from Hacker News

The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments (2000)

by DvdGiessen on 3/10/21, 8:37 AM with 33 comments

• by mrpippy on 3/10/21, 3:52 PM

  "Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null"

  https://www.brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf

• by lordleft on 3/10/21, 2:43 PM

  Does anyone else remember when MacOS marketing made UNIX a significant part of its sales pitch? I remember a giant, titanium UNIX logo

• by pwinnski on 3/10/21, 2:40 PM

  I still remember being in awe that they pulled this off at all, clumsy as some of the compromises were.

  Newer filesystems and application designs have eliminated many of the differences, although I still miss resource forks.

• by bad_username on 3/10/21, 5:07 PM

  > some of the user interface features pioneered by Mac OS such the desktop

  That is not true. The desktop metaphor, for example, was first introduced at Xerox PARC in 1970, and used commercially in the Xerox Star workstation in 1981.

• by musicale on 3/13/21, 7:14 AM

  Apple seems to have a long history of integrations of Mac OS (and the Mac user interface) and UNIX, starting in the 1980s and continuing through today: A/UX, AWS (Apple Workgroup Server), MAE, Rhapsody, OS X, modern macOS...

  Not to mention the OS X-like variants for their other platforms: iOS, tvOS, iPadOS, watchOS...

  Also consider the various Mach implementations on Apple hardware: MacMach, MachTen, MkLinux, OS X/Darwin...

  Sadly it seems that the classic Mac API died when Carbon and 32-bit apps died, so you can't easily port old Mac apps to modern macOS. macOS (and iOS) seem to have a rather poor record for backward compatibility, and it's only going to get worse with the current architectural switch to Apple Silicon...